Human Rights Watch wrote last week to the Tunisian National Constituent Assembly on its second draft constitution, released December 14, 2012. HRW faintly praised the Assembly for improvements since the first draft--dropping the criminalization on "the sacred" and any form of "normalization" with "Zionism and the Zionist state," including language that better protects equal rights of women--and sharply criticized the Assembly for continued problems. Among the criticisms:

The draft fails to explicitly mention international human rights conventions and fails to specify whether human rights treaties that have been ratified by Tunisia apply directly as law in Tunisia.

The draft includes language that protects various rights, but with provisos like "as provided for by law," or some such, suggesting that "the law" has broad leeway to interpret limitations on rights.